Some judicial cases become (unfortunately) categories of the spirit. The Garlasco crime is now one of these: no longer just the death of Chiara Poggi, which occurred on 13 August 2007, but a topos of Italian justice — that justice which, as Sciascia wrote in the famous The day of the owl“it’s not the same for everyone”.
Almost 19 years later, with a definitively convicted man moving towards a retrial and a new suspect whose guilt rests on rather thin foundations, we are faced not only with a probable miscarriage of justice, but with something more disturbing: a media system that, rather than caring about the truth itself, cares about its own version of the factstakes pleasure in one’s intuitions and beliefs. As if, after Chiara’s tragic death, there were not at stake the life of a probable innocent man who has served over 10 years in prison and of a suspect who risks ending up, without the necessary evidence for a definitive conviction, exactly like his predecessor.
The murderous dynamic that doesn’t add up
The accusatory reconstruction against Andrea Sempio – the friend of Chiara’s brother, who killed the girl after a rejected sexual approach – presents rather significant gaps. Sempio would have lurked in the garden, struck with a hammer he had never found, gone to the bathroom to look at himself – to look at himself in the mirror, mind you – and then washed in a kitchen sink that was never analysed. Then he would have fled across the fields, covered in blood, to his grandmother’s house, who would not have noticed anything. Not even a stain. The grandmother as a Beckettian character: present without seeing, witness without testimony.
Chiara Poggi’s mysterious anklet
Then there is the anklet that Chiara was wearing at the time of her death – a neglected element, half analyzed, on which the Poggi consultant, Dario Redaelli, reports traces of DNA presumably belonging to the murderer. And here comes Alberto Stasi, the convicted boyfriend, who in 2025 before prosecutors declares that he has never seen that accessory in four years of their relationship, not even on their last trip together to London. “Chiara didn’t give me a real explanation” — and that lack of explanation, crystallized in the minutes, is perhaps the most disturbing detail of the whole affair: an object without history, brought that day for unknown reasons, with someone’s DNA on it.
Garlasco, beyond any reasonable doubt
Modern criminal law, at least in its Anglo-Saxon formulation that we have borrowed with the superficial enthusiasm that we reserve for intellectual fashions, requires conviction “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Here the doubt is not reasonable: it is structural. The intercepted soliloquies, the DNA, a fingerprint – number 33 – they are not enough to build procedural certainty. If anything, they are enough to construct a novel version. And novels, however compelling, should not be served in prison.
The signs of an epilogue identical to that of Stasi are there, from first to last: the same treatment from newspapers, television, radio, podcasts, social media, and so on and so forth. Same rush to judgment, same presumption in convincing ourselves that we know how things went, after all these years and without having all the elements available. Asking questions is legitimate and a sign of intelligence, but justice must provide the answers. Which then, more often than not, gets them wrong. History should teach us not to repeat the same mistakes. But the elements for a Stasi encore, unfortunately, are all there.
